Night, Oh Night
by Laqueus
Summary: There is darkness, and there are stars. The war has been over for a decade. The Spirit, destroyed. In the dark of the night, two people deal with the scars that are left. [Tremily]


AN: Warning for slight body horror, and mentions of dermatillomania.  
Recommended Listening: "Mirror's Edge: Solar Fields"

oOo

 _There is darkness, and there are stars._

She's alone, floating in an inky-black field that stretches out all around her into the far distance, an endless, open vista. There are many types of darkness, from the cold, frightening darkness that holds dangers, to the stuffy darkness of a bedroom on a hot night, but the darkness here is warm; a soft, velvety blanket that muffles everything, making all seem quiet. As she floats, she realises that she's actually being supported and cradled with a surprising amount of care and gentleness. She feels so warm, so comfortable. Eternity could pass by here in this mysterious star field, and strangely, she finds herself not minding such a possibility. Most odd. Such inactivity would normally have her champing away, desperate to do something, but here...

Here it seems okay. Tolerable.

She gazes at the stars, clustered together a little way from her. They're so beautiful, each winking different colours. As she watches them she's vaguely reminded of being... somewhere. A place she once lived in, a long, long time ago. The name of it is on the tip of her tongue, little facts and snippets of information hovering just of reach, but her mind is feeling lackadaisical and foggy; it's too much work to try and piece the smaller bits together. The name eludes her, but the main recollection does not. Here in the star field, she is reminded of staring up at the night sky in that mysterious land. When you looked hard enough without a telescope, the stars seemed to flicker and change colours almost imperceptibly, on the very edge of your vision.

Here, the more she looks, the more she can make out two recurring colours, red and blue, scattered together, flashing purple. Without warning she suddenly finds herself moving closer, as if subconsciously trying to get a better look. She drifts among the stars, and now they're all around her, no longer flickering points of light. She squints. The stars seem… _sharp_ , somehow. She looks harder, and edges slowly come into view. With a start, she realises that the stars are actually crystalline. They're not a uniform shape, all bearing the same cut and number of facets, no, it's more like they've been cut at random. Broken, even.

Despite the warmth and the comfort and the serenity of the place, something begins to prickle at the back of her mind. Something's off; the shades of red and blue are so familiar that it makes her head reel. The stars themselves are spinning like tiny planets. On a nearby red shard, part of a familiar disjointed spiral in two parts rotates into view, and her heart almost stops at the shock. She knows this symbol, it was a brand worn around her neck for longer than she likes to think about. She rapidly looks at the other shards, eyes roaming over them, searching, and there it is; more fragments of the symbol strewn across the rest of the red shards. _Oh no._

She immediately turns her attention to the blue shards; they're the wrong shade of blue to share the same symbol as the red, instead being a paler, duskier hue. The symbol she's now searching for is harder, a bit more spread out and abstract. There! In bits and pieces on the chunks here and there are broken-up traces of streaks and spots. Another symbol she knows, a brand worn by another. Her stomach flops and her gorge rises as pieces of symbols that she hasn't seen in a decade dot the crystal around her.

These aren't stars.

' _No,_ ' she thinks. ' _No, these were destroyed ten years ago._ '

Something in the air _drops_. The darkness is now the cold, frightening kind, dangers hiding in its depths.

' _No, no, no,_ ' she thinks, floating in a field of shattered Stones.

She feels like a lonely swimmer on the open ocean who's just spotted a multitude of shark  
fins drawing near. Panic grips her mind at the possible future this hints at; she can't go back, she won't go back, she can't be a pawn again!

' _No!_ '

oOo

Emily wakes with a start, eyes snapping open.

She's greeted by darkness, and she freezes. _Isitthedreamisitthedreamisitthedream,_ runs through her mind in a panicky little chant. Slowly her eyes adjust and dim shapes materialise out of the gloom in varying shades of dark. Emily relaxes slightly; she isn't dreaming. This is the dark of a room, not the all-encompassing black of the dream. For a few minutes Emily simply lies there, staring up at the ceiling as the dream floats about and gradually recedes from the forefront of her mind. She forces herself to relax her body, letting her mind spread as she focuses on the sensations around her, grounding her. The weight of her body against the mattress. The sheet covering her, with little gaps of cold here and there. She's been moving in her sleep again, wriggling upwards out of the bed, and the night air is cold against her bare shoulders; Emily shuffles back under the covers. Next to her Trellis shifts in his sleep, snoring softly.

Still, the dream lingers in Emily's mind, stubbornly sticking in the back like an out-of-reach spider in a high ceiling corner. She frowns. Was it a dream? Or was it signal for something darker? Could it be _him_ once more? Emily thinks of the sight of the shards floating in darkness, the sudden panic that came at the end. Her heartrate's increasing, time to calm down.

' _He's dead,_ ' Emily thinks. 'i _He's dead, and we destroyed him completely. **It was just a dream. It was just a dream,**_ ' she repeats in her mind, more forcefully this time.

The Spirit was dead. Or if not dead (since he was never truly _alive_ ), then obliterated. Gone. Completely. Never to meddle again. They're beyond his reach.

Emily rolls onto her side, and fixates on the bedside table beside her to try and calm herself down. Smooth top, darker sides, made out of two different types of wood. _Gone, gone, gone_. Stupid dream. Now the sight of red and blue shards hanging in black is filling her mind, blocking out other thoughts; the more Emily fights it, the more it pushes back. She squeezes her eyes shut, frustrated. Opens them. Flips onto her other side. Emily is greeted with the sight of Trellis' bare back, a familiar, scarred landscape. She fixates on that instead and lets her mind relax.

Slowly, the dream ebbs away completely, and Emily sighs with relief. It was just a dream. The Spirit and the Stones are long gone.

Calm and reassured once more, Emily snuggles down, ready to sleep.

Time passes, possibly a minute, possibly three hours, Emily can't tell. What she can tell however, is that she's not falling asleep. It must be the middle of the night judging by the quality of the darkness, but thanks to that lousy dream she's now wide awake.

"Well, this is amazing," Emily mutters.

She debates getting up, but the air is cold, the bed is warm, and she's not exactly clothed due to… earlier. And the process of getting dressed would require leaving the nice, warm bed.

"Wha's 'mazin'?" mumbles Trellis blearily from off to her right. He turns slightly, one glowing eye peeking over his shoulder.

Emily shivers. Man, that's creepy. No matter how many times she sees it, it's always a surprise to see eyes glowing in the dark, like something out of an Earth cartoon.

"Nothing's amazing," she says. "Go back to sleep, Trellis."

"S'everything okay?" He asks, voice gradually becoming clearer.

"Everything's fine. Go back to sleep."

"Mhm." Trellis' head dips back down once more, and there is a moment of silence in the darkness. Then-

"Well, great."

Trellis rolls over, eyes glowing spookily in the darkness. "Looks like we're both awake now."

The blanket shuffles as Trellis brings a hand up and draws it down his face in an action that's half-tired, half-exasperated.

"Thanks a lot, Emily," he murmurs through his hand.

"Pfft," Emily rolls her eyes. "Not my fault you're such a light sleeper."

"Well, perhaps if you didn't chatter and roll about so much, some of us would be able to sleep," says Trellis, responding with an exaggerated eyeroll of his own.

" _Excuse me_ your highness, but maybe I wouldn't be so active if you weren't constantly stealing the blanket and making the rest of us so cold." Emily tugs on the blanket. Secretly she's thankful for this banter, as it stops her mind from wandering.

"That's it, I'm filing for a divorce," he murmurs.

" _Finally._ "

As they speak, the two gradually shuffle together until their foreheads are gently resting against one another. They lie like that for a little while, eyes sliding shut. Emily feels her body beginning to settle into that pre-sleep stillness. It's nice, and she feels she could easily drift into sleep like this.

Suddenly visions of the dream rear up in her mind. Emily's eyes snap open and she jerks violently away, wincing.

"Emily?" says Trellis. His brow is furrowed, but then again his brow is always furrowed, so that's nothing new. "What's wrong?"

Emily draws away. _Just a dream, just a dream._

"Nothing." She rolls over.

" _Emily,_ " says Trellis flatly. There's a disbelieving note in his voice.

"It's nothing," she protests.

oOo

It's not 'nothing' and Trellis knows that for a fact. Something's definitely upset Emily; she closed herself off so fast that he could practically hear the doors slam.

"Emily." He reaches out and rests and hand on her shoulder. She shrugs it off.

"I don't want to talk about it," she mutters.

Trellis sighs, a soft noise in the darkness. There's no point in trying to force her to talk; it'd be like trying to force the north ends of two magnets together. The harder you try, the more resistance you'll meet. It's better to just let her speak in her own time. After all, they've both got scars, hidden or otherwise, that've shaped them, made them grow and react in particular ways. Trellis watches Emily for a moment. She's showing no signs of getting out of bed, and neither is she fidgeting. His eyes narrow. At least he can count two things out, but still…

"Alright," he says. "Alright."

A small eternity passes, and a faint noise drifts up in the darkness. It takes Trellis a moment to catch it; it's the sound of someone muttering under their breath, repeating the same thing over and over, but he can't quite make out what it is. Emily is beginning to hunch in on herself, tension lining her back.

Okay, time to intervene.

"Emily, come on. How about a walk?"

The muttering quietens. Stops. For a moment Trellis is unsure whether Emily is going to respond at all, but then she speaks. Her voice sounds slightly hoarse.

"Yeah. Yeah, a walk."

And so they dress and wander the halls together. It's funny how a building changes at night, going from a home to a strange liminal space where everything feels a little off. It's like an entirely new place with a slightly otherworldly, mystical air about it. They don't speak; Emily doesn't talk about whatever's bothering her, and Trellis doesn't push her. He knows that she'll talk when she's ready. She always does.

oOo

A couple of nights later they're lying in bed once more, intertwined together. It's been a long day, full of politics, and Trellis feels as if his head's been stuffed with wadges of dry newspaper. He wants the best for his people, he really does, but if he has to read one dry-worded clause or another ancient treaty, he'll scream. He's just on the verge of dropping off when Emily speaks.

"Hey, Trellis. Do you think the Spirit is gone for good?"

"Hm?" It takes a moment for his mind to wrap around what she's said and catch the meaning in the words. It's been a _very_ long day.

"Yes?" He shakes himself, coming to a little as he continues. "He has to be. Otherwise everyone's effort will have been for naught."

Emily doesn't look convinced, eyebrows drawing together, gaze dipping off to one side in thought, so Trellis continues. "Emily, we were there. We all were! We all saw it happen, _felt_ it happen. The Spirit is gone. And in the end, all we can do is believe that until we are proven wrong."

"Hmm," says Emily. There's a slightly bitter quality to her expression now. "I hope you're right."

"What's happened? Have you seen something?" asks Trellis, concerned.

Emily waves the question away. "I don't think so. Maybe." She leans back into the pillow. "I need time to think."

She kisses him. They both know she's using it as a distraction, but they pursue the topic no more that night.

oOo

It's cold. Cold enough to knock the air from your lungs and make your skin freeze. Cold enough to lose fingers and toes. He's in the middle of a great forest, trees coated in ice, withered leaves frozen onto long-dead branches. There's not a whisper of sound, not a twitch of movement; it's rather like being in a painting. Already he's shivering and hunching in on himself, body desperately trying to warm itself.

He starts walking; he'll freeze if he stays in one place. In fact his feet already feel like they've frozen and died, dead, heavy lumps of flesh welded to the ends of his legs, making him clump awkwardly along. The thick layer of snow doesn't make the going any easier. Out of nowhere, his back prickles, the gaze of an unseen watcher sitting heavily upon him. He looks this way and that, trying to catch sight of whatever's watching him, but it's no use; all he catches are brief snatches of the tails ends of a number of amorphous, translucent shades. He stiffens, an impressive feat considering that his body feels like it's on the verge of freezing solid.

 _Dark Shadows._

They shift silently between the trees, always watching, never stopping in one place for more than a second. He keeps walking, catching what glimpses he can. At one point he spots a slitted yellow eye; it stares for a moment before fully retreating behind a tree trunk. The forest is thick with shadows, more purple than white, but somehow he knows that as long as he keeps moving, the shadows will stay back. And now as he looks, he realises that beyond the trees he can see stone; too neat and precise to be a cliff face. He peers through the trees as he walks, catching snatches of a pattern here and there. He looks up, and there, high above him is a ceiling he knows from his youth. The forest is enclosed within his childhood home.

A path is emerging, snow laying half-melted across it, showing a cursed recognisable floor beneath. He tries to turn from the path but his feet are locked onto it, stuck in rhythm of step after step after step. Something's coming, and panic rises in him.

A figure emerges ahead, tall and gaunt and _faceless_. No, not faceless, _masked_. Smooth grooves curve downwards over white porcelain, crowned with a small indentation. His legs feel like they're about to lock up at the sight; the design alone strikes as much fear and anger into him as the figure standing before once did. Still does. _Always will,_ a small part of him whispers.

He stops in front of the figure. Suddenly his scar starts to sting, throbbing with pain to the beat of his heart. Something wet is trickling a ticklish path down his face; his scar is no longer a scar, but an open wound.

The figure's hand is coated in blood, dripping onto the snow and tile below. It sounds unnaturally loud in the silence.

The shadows draw closer. He needs to start walking, _he needs to start walking **now**_ , but he can't move his feet, they're frozen solid to the floor.

Slowly the masked figure teaches up with their bloodied hand and peels the mask away. He almost chokes because _there's no face underneath_.

The figure hands the mask to him, bloody streaks and fingerprints marring the white. To his horror, his own hand is rising to accept it.

Accepts it.

For a moment his gaze flicks downwards to the bloodied mask in his hand, and when he looks back up the figure is gone.

He doesn't have time to dwell on it or even be relieved, as there's an odd crumbling, twitchy sensation in his hands; he looks down only to see that his hands are rotting away, lumps of flesh slipping off the bone as a sickly-sweet scent fills the air. He tries to drop the mask, the source of the rot, but his fingers are locked around it, and now the rot is spreading up his arms, across his chest, and the shadows are circling, closing in in a tight-knit mass of purple, and they're closer and closer and closer and the rot is spreading up his neck and down his torso, reaching his legs and there's nothing but a whirling many-eyed mass of many-flecked purple, and the rot is on his face, _it's on his face!_ and-

oOo

Trellis' eyes fly open as he jolts into wakefulness. The room is warm; it's almost a shock compared to the cold of the dream. He sits up, the panic from the dream still knocking around inside him and providing him with a stressful burst of energy. The room spins as his body protests the sudden upwards movement.

There's an unknown sensation in his hands; Trellis whips them out from under the bedclothes in a movement that's entirely too fast and too forceful. He stares at them, heart in his mouth, expecting to see flesh rotting away. It's several minutes before he notices that they're trembling. Not rotting. Trembling.

He keeps on staring anyway.

oOo

Emily's awoken by an oddly violent burst of movement to her left. In her sleep-addled mind, there's a small note of alarm, a leftover by-product of living during wartime. Emily turns, sleep-heavy body trying to scan the room. Is there danger? Her eyes alight on an upright lump in the darkness, which resolves itself into Trellis. There's a distant look in his eyes, and he's staring blankly down at his hands. They're trembling violently. Oh no.

"Trellis," says Emily. "Trellis."

No response.

Emily hefts herself up into a sitting position.

"Trellis," she tries again, this time giving his shoulder a shake.

His head swings around to her, gaze blank.

"Come on. The dream's over. You're awake. You're okay. It's okay," she continues.

Trellis' eyes clear and focus as he gradually returns from wherever he was.

"Em," he says, before quickly correcting himself. "Emily."

"I'm here," she says. "It's okay."

After a moment Emily feels Trellis' arms slip around her, pulling her close. It's a little unpleasant since he's slightly damp and clammy from dream-sweat, but now's not the time for a barbed comment. His arms feel strangely stiff and brittle. Emily hooks her arms around him, and they sit like that for a little while in the dark and the quiet. He's grounding himself, just like she was the other night. Fixating on something real. Banishing the dream back to the realm of fantasy.

Finally, he speaks.

"It was the forest in the castle," Trellis mumbles into Emily's hair.

Ah. That one. It's an especially nasty nightmare, and like most of the dreams they have, is recurring.

That's the thing about going off and fighting in a war when you're fourteen and sixteen respectively. While you're in the thick of it, your mind somehow _copes_ , propping itself up and forcing itself to run because everything's terrible and there simply isn't time to do something as extravagant as have a mental breakdown. It's afterwards when it happens. Not when the war is immediately over, no, it's when the rebuilding is well underway and you're no longer constantly on the go, no longer having to solely focus on driving yourself onwards and occupy yourself with something, when you can relax a little. That's when it happens, when the mind finally stops coping and the damage becomes apparent. The sort of damage where you'll see something or hear a particular noise and you'll react as if your brain has been jabbed with a red-hot iron poker. Or in Emily and Trellis' case, have recurring dreams and nightmares.

Once, back on Earth, back in the days when Emily still went to school, there'd been a particular English lesson where the topic had been 'dreams'. There had been the usual related actives, write about a dream you had, describe an aspect of the dream that stood out, etc, etc, but it was something that the teacher said that stuck in Emily's mind.  
When asked why people had dreams, the teacher had told them about a theory that dreams were possibly the mind's way of processing events, ideas, and themes.

She's reminded of it now.

' _If that's the case,_ ' thinks Emily as she holds her husband in the dark, ' _then something's broken in the both of us._ '

It's true. It's like their minds are unable to process what happened, unable to process what they went through, and so they're now stuck in a loop, replaying certain themes over and over like a broken record, in a desperate attempt to understand. A dream can't just be _let go_ or _disregarded_ , no, eventually it boomerangs back into their brains, and there'll come a night like tonight where one of them will wake in a state of terror, the past returning to haunt them in a new form once more. And both of them each have a particular theme to their dreams.

Emily's dreams have the lovely theme of _helplessness_ , most often occurring in the form of being trapped in something falling. Sometimes she hits the ground and the container around her buckles, crushing her, metal cutting into soft flesh, bones ground into powder. Sometimes she never hits the ground and is left in a constant state of expectation, fearing for the moment when a tremor will ripple through the metal and it'll compress. Sometimes she dreams of fire, and those are the worst dreams of all, because they're not conjured scenarios, but memories.

Trellis' theme on the other hand, seems to be _rot and decay_. The majority of the time it's centred on him, his own flesh rotting and sliding off his bones whilst he's still alive, spreading across his body like a virulent infection. Sometimes he's just the carrier, rot spreading from him to others like a dreadful plague, a wave of suffering and misery which he cannot do anything about, only make the situation worse.

These are the nights when Emily wakes screaming, or half-sprints, mostly-stumbles out of the room because it's just too close, it's all _too close_ and _too much_. These are the nights when she walks around for hours, stopping and starting at random and taking unusual detours just because she can, for the sensation that she is in control.

These are the nights when Trellis stares at his hands, and will keep on staring at them until morning if not stopped, trying to spot any trace of rot or infection, sometimes picking at the skin to see if there's anything lurking beneath. These are the nights when he tries to isolate himself, to stop the non-existent rot from spreading and killing everyone.

Together they combat the dreams as best they can, holding one another when they want to be held, and giving space when space is needed. Trellis walks with Emily, makes sure that she doesn't walk the night away and gets some rest. Emily stops Trellis from focusing on his hands, makes sure that he doesn't start to pick or completely hide himself away.

"He's dea- gone," Trellis says abruptly.

The words bring Emily's dream to mind, the one she had a couple of nights ago. And suddenly, sitting here in the dark, something clicks into place. The dream is just that: a dream. It's not a prophecy, it doesn't hold some deeper meaning, and it isn't some supernatural Void-with-a-capital-V meeting like the ones she used to have all those years ago. It's just her mind's usual crap way of processing an event in her life. It feels vitally important that she talk about it _now,_ that if she doesn't speak then the dream will burrow back into her, unable to be shifted for who-knows how long.

"Remember the other night?" says Emily, moving her head to peer upwards. From this angle, a single glowing eye peeks down at her. "The one where I woke you up and didn't want to talk about it?"

"That could be any night," Trellis answers weakly, teasing.

"Oh, thanks a lot." Emily's relieved that there's a bite to his response, as it shows that he's recovering. Still, she shoots a slightly frosty glance at Trellis.

He lets out a small, amused huff. "No, I know the one you mean. We walked around."

"Yeah. Well, I had a dream."

"Ah. Which one was it?"

"It was new." Emily pauses. She's never been a chatty person, and an old, small part of her doesn't want to talk about this, _to not be a burden_ , but she goes on regardless. "It was pitch-black, and I was in a field of stars." Trellis' arms instinctively tighten at the words 'pitch-black'.

"I was fine," Emily quickly cuts in. "It was, I don't know, open space. Not. Not enclosed. I wasn't trapped. Anyway, there were these stars. Only when I got closer I saw that they weren't stars, they were Stone shards."

"Stone shards?"

"Yes. Mine and yours. They'd been broken, and they were floating there. And once I realised that, I," the words catch for a moment, "I suddenly felt incredibly panicked, like it was a warning or a sign that I was about to be sucked back into that life. Then I woke up."

Trellis is silent for a moment. Then-

"So that's why you asked about the Spirit the other night."

"Yeah."

There's the sensation of a soft kiss on her head, and a stupid happy twinge runs through her. What is she, 14?

' _Ah, what the heck,_ ' thinks Emily, and angles herself enough to kiss his cheek in response before continuing.

"Anyway, I've thought about it, and I think it's just like the others. The other dreams.  
Like when I dream about falling and you..." Emily trails off, having accidentally wandered into dangerous territory.

"Dream about rot," Trellis finishes. He holds up a hand, inspects it for a second, before slipping it back around Emily once more. "Go on."

"It's just my mind trying to process things. Just because I'm seeing something from the past in the dream, doesn't mean that it's actually there," says Emily, and they both know that she's not just talking about the Stones. In a move that her fourteen year-old self would have found hugely aggravating and embarrassing, Emily actually feels better for having spoken and gotten it out in the open.

Trellis meanwhile seems better for listening; his hands are no longer trembling and he's relaxed against her.

Emily suddenly feels exhausted, as if talking about the dream has drained some mysterious reservoir of energy. She forces herself awake; now is not the time to drop off.

"How're you doing?" Emily whispers.

"Better. Not great, but… better." There's a pause as Trellis shifts a bit, awkwardly causing Emily to be jostled about.

"Hey!" she protests.

"Sorry. Thanks for telling me," he adds after a moment.

After all, a new dream is always a difficult thing to tell. Mostly they end up telling each other little fragments here and there, the whole picture assembled over many years. A full telling like this is rare.

"It's funny," says Trellis, and Emily jolts awake from where she'd been falling asleep.

"What is?" she asks, trying to sound fully-awake.

"When we met all those years ago, I don't think either of us could have predicted an outcome such as this."

"Mmm. I beat you up and now we're married and talk about dreams. Must've made one heck of a first impression."

They both drop off after that, still locked in that position. When they wake in the morning, they're both stiff and sore in multiple places from sleeping like that, and there's a deal of complaining, but each secretly think it was worth it.

oOo

The dream returns. Of course it does. (They'll always be plagued by their recurring dreams, they both know that. It's a plain fact of life, just like the sun rising, or their eventual kids being an odd amalgamation of human and elf. But they deal with it as best they can, together.) The dream still panics her, and there are nights when Emily can do nothing about that. But there are other, kinder nights, where she's able to examine the dream and take strength and comfort in it: the Stones are shattered, the Spirit dead, the Mother Stone gone. They're free, all of them.

And nothing feels better than that.

oOo

AN: **FORGIVE ME FOR WHAT I HAVE IMPLIED childhood destroyed childhood destroyed**  
But yes! I saw a particular beautiful picture by theYasha over on DA ("Freedom, Someday"), and it really fired up the ol' imagination and I simply had to write something for it.

Itttttt's kinda thematically similar to _Hands, Scars, Hands_ and I'm sorry about that, but recently I've been so arse-deep in my own writing work and having to focus so heavily on it, that I'm just thankful that I've been able to write something different.:

WHY DO ALL MY AMULET FICS INCLUDE BODY HORROR HOW DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING


End file.
